Adobe Customer Service

I am trying to purchase a license of Adobe Creative Suite 3, and more specifically Adobe Photoshop 3. Because I am still a student, I am technically entitled to purchase an education license of various Adobe products.

As usual, and that’s perfectly normal, there are certain restrictions to this. My problem is the following: I am a student in a French university but I am currently in the US for a few months. As such, I would like to purchase Adobe products on the US education store rather than on the French one. Unfortunately, the web site does not provide clear information, at least to me, as whether this would be possible or not. That’s why I tried to contact Adobe customer service.

My journey started by calling the customer service on the phone. After waiting for about 15 minutes, I just hung up. That’s the first time I actually wished there was a robot voice telling me something along the lines of “your call is important to us, please hold until we can take care of you.” I then used to form on the web site itself. After three business days (don’t promise a reply in 24 hours guys ;-) I got a nice but useless generic email telling me to call the number I already tried. This lead me to the third option, the direct chat. A nice and polite guy acted as if he was trying to help me but all he could tell me was to visit the web site, which I already did, thank you. After several useless questions and long pauses, surely to make me think he was actually looking for an answer, he just told me to call the customer service on the phone.

I called again. Waited for 10 minutes. Hung up. I called back, this time choosing another option (“Purchase Adobe products”). This time someone actually answered after 5 minutes! He was really polite too. But in less than 30 seconds he told me to call the number again and choose the option that already led me to death by elevator music twice. Hung up. Called back. Waited for 10 minutes. Hung up. Cursed in French. Opened my trial version of Photoshop CS3 to process some personal photos.

I guess I should just try to order the product and see how Adobe reacts when I fax them a French student ID. I know that the money I would spend on their product is insignificant for such a large company and that I am only one, non-business user. But still, I wish it was easier.

And if they don’t let me purchase an education license? I’ll just buy a regular license; their stuff is too good.

13 Responses to “Adobe Customer Service”

But I’ve got one question for you: you’ve got a Photoshop CS3 TRIAL version? Can you point me to where you got that – it’s not available on the website…

It’s really unfortunate that Adobe is not keeping the CS3 beta active for longer, since it would be nice to have a bit of time to migrate to the final version or at least give users the time to order the final version – right now you can only preorder from Adobe Germany, but the Beta already ceased to work…!

Cheers and good luck, I’d just order the student version and fax them the french student id…

I tried calling my ISP’s support line a couple of weeks ago and every time I would get a “all lines are busy please call later” response no matter which time of the day I called. I than found a nice trick: I would call, get the usual response and than immediately hang up and call again. For some odd reason they answered almost immediately after the second call.

I say if they don’t like your French student id and want you to purchase a full license change to Corel or PaintShop Pro. These two items can do the same thing as PhotoShop as well as open PhotoShop psd files and they are much cheaper than Adobe’s products.

Ughh, no kidding, I just went through 40 minute customer service attempt #2 to apply for my upgrade. Then I googled it and got to sales within 2 minutes. Go figure! It’s like they want to sell things or something…